“The maps were part of one of the most ambitious cartographic enterprises ever undertaken. During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings. The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories.”

Storyboard Fountain is an open source tool for your Mac to visualise screenplays. You can write a script and quickly visualise your scenes to test if they work.

Charles Forman, who created the tool, was inspired through his perspective as a software developer in the game industry. In his view, the standard approach to creating a movie seems not very collaborative. So he created Storyboard Fountain to enable iterative development of movie concepts.

“Storyboard Fountain works with a Fountain screenplay file. Open it, and the entire script is displayed on the left of the file. Action, dialogue, and parenthetical lines are shown as elements, so you can create boards for every filmable line in the movie. In fact, you can have as many boards as you want per line, or even choose not to have a board, if it’s not necessary. As you draw, each drawing tool you use is saved on its own layer. The images are saved in a folder next to your Fountain file on your hard drive. The reference to each board is saved in location in the Fountain file itself. As a result, you can use the Fountain editor of your choice to edit your script while maintaining the integrity of the location of the storyboards.”

The created screenplay file can be exported to editing software such as Apple Final Cut or Adobe Premiere including scene timing and any audio recording you created during the development of the scenes, e.g. for story pitches.

For a more detailed look into his approach, check out his article “Drawing a story”. I consider it to be very interesting and am wondering wether there is much room for innovation within the movie business and the way feature films may be produced.